from The Grassblade Light:

16
          in this Most Christian of Empires, poets are yids

 
Volare, pigeons – phrasers, fly – while I
maroon my coracle – pivoting on Marlowe’s eye.
A helicopter - inside Hagia Sophia!
scouring out the bony bowl, below.

 
Thus writ, Elena, me to thee –
a cut-rate Peirce or cutpurse early wizard
nested inside unfinished ploys and cluttered
correspondences – implausible, really –

 
an arrested coot swamped in my own so-gassy
sea.  Oh how the Faustian word devolves
to fussy fustian so fast!  While Washington
revolves, importentously demublican – crass

 
mad yesmoon and madams need a sacrifice
for all their rancid sacrifices to the golden
figurine yoked round their nooks – one
slop-happy bull-calf out of Arkansas

 
will have a big to-do for tedium, and all
malevolent perfectionists will drive themselves
distracted by their own fraud-warring werewolves
howling through judicial noon – hoot-owls

 
and ravens shaving over the Capitol – hellcats.
In the canonical inverted mirror (Marlowe’s
dying day, Walt Whitman’s birth) shows
wheel toward love’s decent hovercraft – it’s

 
a valentine, or dove, I do believe –
reconciled at last in a festive death-dive
through the poopdeck of muddy Mardi Gras
for the Black Pearl of Jubilee.  And come up alive.


 
                        2.1.99